As conflict tightens its grip on the West Bank, classrooms are now becoming frontlines of a quieter crisis: the erosion of education. For students like 17-year-old Ahmad Haje, daily life is shaped by checkpoints, raids and fear, forcing younger generations to learn under constant violence, disruption and uncertainty.
“How can I focus on the laws of physics or the rules of language when the sound of gunfire fills the classroom?” says Ahmad Haje, a bright and ambitious 17-year-old student from Burqa, just outside the city of Nablus in the West Bank. “My daily life is a mix of anxiety and hope – anxiety about the unknown, and a desire for change.”
Since the war in Gaza began, the West Bank has been increasingly overlooked by international media – despite it facing one of the largest displacement crises since 1979, leaving thousands of children out of school.
As the occupation grows more emboldened, international leverage over the region weakens, and the Knesset passes laws that tighten the stranglehold on the Palestinian economy, one of the most fundamental pillars of society is fast deteriorating: education.
From a school commute mired in violence and intimidation by illegal settlers and Israeli occupation forces, to funding cuts, arbitrary detentions and a curriculum buckling under the weight of censorship and the threat of cultural erasure, Ahmad is one of over 782,000 pupils in the West Bank fighting for their right to learn.
Ahmad Haje, 17 years old, Burqa – a village outside of Nablus (Image supplied by Ahmad)
Checkpoints and delays: the challenges of commute
“My story begins every morning with the journey to school,” says Ahmad, over text messages. The only person in this article who isn’t communicating in English, Ahmad inputs his thoughts in Arabic into Google Gemini before sending the translations on. “The commute is governed less by distance, more by the unpredictable realities on the ground,” he says.
Checkpoints and road barriers are a frequent reality for students in the region. There are more than 800 barriers in the West Bank, ranging from permanently-staffed checkpoints, to physical obstructions such as earth mounds, trenches and gates that block traffic and force civilians and aid deliveries to re-route.
The so-called “flying checkpoints” appear arbitrarily, stalling traffic as the military verifies IDs and carries out randomised security checks.
“These are not just time delays,” says Ahmad. “These are attempts to break our will and constant reminders that even the simplest details of our lives are controlled.”
Schools regularly recruit teachers from neighbouring districts, meaning road blockages and diversions cause massive disruption to the school day. Fadi Masoud, the head teacher at Ahmad’s school in Burqa has to deal with these incidents on a regular basis.
“Teachers come from the city centre and from villages far away,” he says. “When they close the roads, the teachers are late – or sometimes, they simply go home. As a headteacher, my heart is in my mouth every day. I feel stressed all the time.”
Settler aggression: a culture of impunity
Checkpoints are but one obstacle on the school commute. While the occupation forces impose blockades, intimidate and detain people at random, Israeli settlers arguably pose an equally – if not more – insidious threat to students, especially those living in isolated, rural regions.
Children in the West Bank on their way to school
There are nearly 700,000 settlers living in 250,000 settlements across the West Bank. They are frequently armed with military-grade weapons by the Israeli government, a move spearheaded by security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir following the October 7 attacks.
Assaults against defenceless Palestinian communities are commonplace, from crop destruction to arson. In March, for instance, local media reported a settler raid at a boys’ secondary school in the town of Hawara, south of Nablus, where they removed the Palestinian flag, installed an Israeli flag in its place and scrawled “death to Arabs” on the walls.
There were 70 recorded incidents of settler violence against students and teachers during the year 2024-2025, according to various child protection charities.
“It ranges from belligerent harassment, staring people down, acting tough, to driving around in ATVs trying to mow down school children,” says Sam Stein, an American Jewish activist and reporter who has spent the past six years embedded in rural villages in the West Bank.
Widespread legal and military protections mean settlers face few if any repercussions for harassment or assault. The activist movement – which has grown significantly in recent years – has provided a much needed defence against this aggression in the form of “protective presence”, but it is a sticking plaster and some are even beginning to question its effectiveness, given activists are increasingly the victims of settler attacks.
But despite the threats activists face, their presence continues to instil a greater sense of calm and security in the community.
“When the activists are here, kids will stop sleeping with their shoes on,” says Sam. He adds that, unfortunately, settler attacks tend to increase when the activists are away, as they know the communities are more vulnerable without them. “I always get the most calls when I’m not around, though,” he says. “It’s massively disproportionate.”
Arbitrary detentions: Palestinian students facing jail time
Clashes between the military or settlers and the local communities rarely end well for Palestinians, who lack legal representation. Children as young as 14 regularly end up in Israeli detention centres for minor assaults, often for months on end.
Defence for Children International – Palestine reported 351 minors in Israeli prisons as of December last year, 51% of those were being held without trial or charge, in what is known as ‘administrative detention’.
The practice is a colonial legacy dating back to the British rule of Palestine, which enables the Israeli authorities to detain individuals – almost exclusively Palestinian – indefinitely without the need to provide evidence.
Fadi has seen multiple of his students affected, detained for as little as throwing stones or bottles at armed forces as they enter their villages. Three of his students are currently in detention.
“They cannot come back to school until they finish their time in jail,” he says. “It’s not a good situation.”
Ahmad himself was released from Israeli jail recently, and while he was reluctant to give details about his time there, his testimony – from psychological abuse, starvation and physical assault – resonates with many.
“It was a struggle readjusting to a life that had moved on without me,” says Ahmad of his release. “My mind once focused on the movements of the guards now had to focus on textbooks.”
UNRWA: a system under scrutiny
Getting to school is one thing. But getting to the end of the school day without disruption is rarely guaranteed.
At the start of last year, the Israeli army launched a huge military operation in the northern West Bank, known as Iron Wall, with the aim of eradicating a militia group known as the Jenin Brigade. It resulted in one of the largest displacements of Palestinians since the second intifada – an uprising which took place in the early 2000s – and led to 64 deaths, including 11 children.
Around 32,000 people – including 12,000 children – were forced out of refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, and civilian infrastructure was badly damaged during the operation. Ten schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were sealed off, leaving 4,000 children without access to education, or forced to resort to online learning or adapted educational programmes for the rest of the year.
This was not the first – nor the last – assault on UNRWA, a relief organisation founded during the Nakba of 1949 that provides educational services to around 48,000 children in 96 schools across the occupied territories. While the quality of education provided by UNRWA is generally considered of high standard – more so than governmental or private institutions – the organisation is at capacity, having received a further 3,000 students in recent months due to strains on state education and displacements.
In May last year, six UNRWA schools were sealed off in East Jerusalem, on the grounds that it was “inciting against Israel” and nearly 800 students were forced to evacuate.
“It was actually a very horrific incident,” says Roland Friedrich, director of UNRWA affairs for the West Bank. “The heavily-armed security forces effectively raided the school. They forced the children out at gunpoint, and the teachers too.”
For the rest of the school year, the pupils had to continue their learning online, finding places at new schools in September.
School closures are not always as sudden – but can be just as traumatic, happening incrementally and causing a huge psychological strain on the students and teachers.
The UNRWA Kalandia Training Institute for young men in Ramallah – a technical college founded in 1953 offering dozens of free programmes from carpentry to mechanics – is one such school. In February 2025, Israeli forces entered the building and demanded the immediate evacuation of its 350 Palestinian students, while firing tear gas and bombs.
Palestinian student at Kalandia Training Centre (Image supplied by UNRWA)
After lengthy negotiations with teaching staff, the army eventually left the building and teaching was allowed to resume. However, in January this year, Israeli authorities cut off the supply of electricity to the school, claiming ownership of the land. The 302 Commission for the Defence of Refugee Rights described it as part of a wider eradication campaign against UNRWA.
“I fear the institute will close and I will lose the chance to study,” says Maytham Rahimi, a Palestinian student at the institute. “My journey at UNRWA school and the technical institute has been excellent, free and high-quality.”
His family’s financial situation will make it hard to complete his studies without aid.
“It’s a huge issue,” says Roland. “Kalandia is the only training centre for young refugee males, aged between 15 and 17. It’s exactly the age group we should be giving a future to. You don’t want to have young men out on the streets, getting involved in violence.”
The debilitating impact of funding cuts on West Bank schools
While UNRWA schools’ highly trained staff and international funding allows for a certain level of resilience in terms of teaching quality – even if interruptions are frequent – for government schools like Ahmad’s, securing a steady cashflow is an uphill struggle.
The war in Gaza has only exacerbated these strains on the Palestinian Authority (PA), the central body providing state education to around 630,000 pupils in the West Bank.
Israel has withheld around $150 million (£110 million) from the PA’s custom tax revenues for the last five years, over controversial payments made to relatives of deceased terrorists, a policy the PA says it has since overturned. Work permit restrictions and a liquidity crisis in Israeli banks has further exacerbated the strains facing the PA.
Education has unfortunately been the collateral damage of these cuts, with teachers working under the PA now paid on average around 60% of their former salaries. School weeks have shortened as a result, with many students receiving only three days of in-person learning a week. Homework and online programmes make up for lost time.
“The children’s mental state is not good at all,” says Fadi. “I tell them, ‘My dears, you must study!’ But not all of them react in the same way. They just play video games or watch reels on Facebook.” More than this, children feel apathetic about education because they see their teachers paid next to nothing and wonder what the point of further education is, Fadi adds.
Ahmad says the loss of learning has had profound psychological effects on him.
“Interruptions or slow connections not only disrupt research,” he says, “but also isolate us from the global academic community, forcing us to put even more work in just to reach the same level.”
Keeping the focus on studies amidst the political turmoil and constant threats of closure is a “major mental challenge,” he adds.
Erasure and discrimination in the Palestinian curriculum
Just as the students and physical learning space of the school are direct targets of Israeli aggression, so too is the Palestinian curriculum, For decades it has been subject to Israeli edits and censorship.
“The curriculum includes a number of interesting topics about Palestinian culture,” says Fadi. “But the Israeli government is forcing the Palestinian Ministry of Education to remove this view from their books, such as the Palestinian map or the keffiyeh.”
Other amendments by the Israeli Ministry of Education include omission of key historical events, including the Nakba of 1948; describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (ignoring Palestinians’ claims to the historic city); and the renaming of Al-Aqsa Mosque, a key religious building in Palestine – and Islam more broadly – as Temple Mount, the former site of the Temple of Jerusalem, an icon of ancient Israel.
In 2018, the Israeli government adopted Decision 3790, allocating a budget of 2.2 billion NIS (Israeli New Shekel) (around £460m) to shrink socioeconomic disparity between Israeli and Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem. NIS 445 million (£93m in 2018) was invested in education, with a focus on promoting and implementing the Israeli curriculum across the region, both at municipal and private schools.
Today, nearly 90% of all students across the region follow the Israeli syllabus, a jump from 51% just a couple of years ago.
Countering concerns about the erosion of the Palestinian identity in school textbooks, the Israeli government claims that the PA curriculum – shared with UNRWA – incites violence. How, then, could a neutral education system, free from political influence, exist in a context like this?
The people standing at the front of the classroom regularly face scrutiny and restrictions, too. In early January this year, the Knesset passed a law banning teachers from working in East Jerusalem unless they also held an Israeli accreditation. Proponents claimed this would prevent the infiltration of “hostile” viewpoints from the PA. Arab lawmakers viewed it as yet another discriminatory act.
The reality on the ground however was devastating, leading to hundreds of classroom hours lost. Private Christian schools in East Jerusalem, which rely heavily on these teachers from outside of the district, were especially impacted, losing a total of 171 of their teachers, equating to a loss of about 15 teachers per school and affecting more than 7,500 pupils. The ban prompted waves of strikes across East Jerusalem.
A call for international action
Whether it’s the demolition of school buildings, the arbitrary detention of students or the direct violence from settlers against students and staff, the classroom in the West Bank is fraught with danger and sustained focus can be nearly impossible.
As the Israeli government gives illegal settlements the green light to expand and the assault on Palestinians’ education continues, little action is being taken by world leaders.
“Right now, the international community is literally doing nothing,” says Sam. “We’ve seen that there can be consequences where there’s political will.”
Students like Ahmad reflect a conviction and determination that is virtually uncrushable, however. And this hope reflects something greater than just wanting to learn; it reflects a determination to sustain the Palestinian identity and culture through education.
“I remain optimistic about my ability to achieve,” he says. “Not because the way forward is easy, but because we have learnt how to carve our way through the rocks.”
Images by Khadija Toufik, unless stated otherwise.
